21 SEPTEMBER – 16 OCTOBER

Twenty-five years ago, in September 1982, Storefront’s first public event got underway in its original Prince Street location. Performance A-Z, organized by the gallery’s founders Kyong Park and R L Seltman, and artist Arleen Schloss, was a 26-day sequence of performances by New York-based artists. Each of the 26 performers was allocated one evening slot. The event became a manifesto for the gallery’s future programming: as Kyong Park wrote in his introduction, “Storefront supports the idea that art and design have the potential and responsibility to affect public policies which influence the quality of life and the future of all cities.”

In late September 2007, Storefront celebrated its 25th anniversary with a new edition of its first event. Entitled Performance Z-A, this 26-day celebration was hosted in Petrosino Park, adjacent to Storefront, in a specially built pavilion designed by Korean architect Minsuk Cho. 

Organized by the three directors who have led Storefront over the past 25 years (Kyong Park, Sarah Herda and Joseph Grima), Performance Z-A was an inclusive event involving not only performance artists but also representatives of all the disciplines that have participated in Storefront’s program in the past decades: architects, artists, writers, researchers, filmmakers, photographers, musicians and more. For 26 days, from September 21 to October 16, 2007, the protagonists of Storefront’s past, present and future hosted 26 evening events including performances, concerts, open discussions, film screenings and interviews.

Notes

A live sound work by Barbara Held. Barbara Held, one of the participants in Performance A-Z at Storefront in 1982, is a flutist who moves out of the time frame of concert music, combining sound and image in installations that usually include live performance. Recent works include Microcòsmics, a project curated by Joan Fontcuberta in which she worked with electron microscope imagery and sound. 
A final screening of Arleen Schloss's footage of the 1982 Performance A-Z will close this event.

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